Authority as a spatial hook for renewables capital: frontierization, zoning and land making in Asian coal economies

As large, coal-dependent economies, India and Indonesia are invested in a green transition. Their respective border regions, Kachchh and Rempang in the Riau Islands, are emerging as hotspots for the manufacture and generation of renewable energy. A green transition is presented as a promising means towards economic productivity and socio-political stability for these marginal regions, while addressing the global climate crisis. This article demonstrates that marginalization has been actively being produced in Kachchh and the Riau Islands through processes of colonial frontierization, post-colonial extraction and zoning, and everyday land deals and land grabs. The resulting disorder and restiveness of side-lined local populations have been managed through securitization and coercion by formal and informal authority. Authority, in the form of the state and non-state actors that further official agendas, has thus controlled space at the margins. By making this space attractive to capital, authority has acted as a hook drawing capital to seemingly risky frontiers in search of high returns. Today, this authority is increasingly anti-democratic and aggressive as it attracts global private capital into meticulously curated spaces in preparation for a green transition. The article shows how renewables authoritarianism and renewables capitalism have a mutually constitutive relationship in Kachchh, India and Rempang, Indonesia — and, possibly, in many other parts of the world.